The reality for the Azkals

The reality is starting to hit the Philippine men’s football team: the players need to be together longer than they are doing so now.

Surveying some European football fans living in the Philippines, the bare-faced assessment of the Azkals’ two matches against Mongolia in the AFC Challenge Cup ranged from “fair” to “good” for the first match in Bacolod, and from “fair” to “poor” for the second match in Mongolia. This is not because they want to put the Philippine football program down, but because they grew up playing the sport and watching it at the highest levels since they were children before deciding to make the Philippines their home.

The Azkals have found a tremendous groundswell of support rarely seen in recent years, and not just thousands of shrieking female fans. Tens of millions of pesos have been pledged by various sports patrons for their training and travel expenses, as well as developmental programs for the Philippine Football Federation. This money will certainly give soccer a huge lift, and the next generation of players will certainly benefit.

However, let us not be surprised – and certainly let us not abandon them – when the team starts to meet setbacks as they did in Ulan Bator. The reality is that the players are also trying to make a living playing on other countries that have affluent professional soccer leagues. And the Philippines, crazy about American sports like basketball and high-scoring sports like boxing and billiards, is just not there yet.

Some of our players are now staring at the hard choice of never being able to play for their European parent’s country anymore if they play seniors soccer for the Philippines. Though diplomatically, they are allowed to carry dual citizenship, in terms of representing a country for international competition, FIFA would only allow them to suit up for the country of one parent. Seeing where the Philippines is ranked in Asia, it is a difficult decision to spend your career playing for a country just building up in the sport, or for an established European power.

Unlike individual sports like tennis, valiantly contributed to by Cecil Mamiit, football is a team game played with a large number of players who have to spend a lot of time playing together to build the chemistry needed to raise their games. Without that kind of synergy, beating higher-ranked teams (and there are very many of them) will be extremely difficult. We can’t count on the Filipino creativity or “diskarte” all the time.

When Andrea “Friday” Camaclang blazed the trail for Filipinos to make it into straight European soccer by signing with Brighton and Hove WFC in 2006, she lamented to this writer that the reason she left the Philippines was that she was frustrated with the level of football played in the country. She would anticipate certain moves from her teammates that never came. The University of the Philippines graduate lamented that she would often find holes in the defense and make a pass, only to find nobody there to receive it.

“I love playing for the national team, but for us to become more competitive, our players have to be exposed to the highest professional level of the sport and that’s in Europe,” Camaclang, an awardee veteran of the Asian Games and SEA Games, told this writer then.

There is no question that the presence of Fil-foreign players is necessary at this point, simply because they have received training that is not available in the Philippines. However, there is also a need for them to develop chemistry with their teammates, and not just athletically but culturally, as well. To this day, some Philippine basketball teams have cliques within the club, stemming from the league’s decision to open its doors to an unlimited number of Fil-foreign (mostly Fil-American) players before the turn of the new millennium. The Azkals will be facing the same challenge when the players in Europe decide to spend longer periods of time in the country.

Azkals’ coach Michael Weiss will also have a harder time building the team up. How do you create plays if you don’t know who’s playing? At the same time, the long-suffering homegrown talents will also be making another adjustment, having one set of procedures or another depending on what number and which combination of their Fil-foreign teammates makes it to a particular match.

Unlike basketball where a player can be signed for a particular tournament and has to play out that contract, the Fil-foreign players are splitting their time between their commercial teams in Europe or other Asian nations, and the Philippine team. This is one big reason why NBA center Yao Ming has been very injury prone. Aside from seeing action for the Houston Rockets, he is mandated to play for the Chinese national team at Asian-level tournaments and up. That’s why the Rockets have never truly taken off.

The possible solutions will not be easy. One answer is for the Fil-foreign players to decide to stay in the Philippines for extended periods of time, as the Younghusband brothers have done. It is a noble sacrifice in the view of Filipino football fans. The other is for us to send players to train abroad, a very expensive proposition which will take both time and money.

The third possibility is to wait for the PFF’s programs to get over this imminent hump, and allow for the “technology transfer” from the Fil-foreign players to their teammates and younger counterparts. This is a necessary part of the team’s evolutionary process.